Illustration by Nick Scott

Five more in-depth health stories:

1. A Day in the Life of an Alzheimer's Caregiver
2. This Is What Living with Crohn's Disease Is Actually Like
3.You Have No Idea What the Term 'Depressed' Really Means Until It Devours You

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A new drug that could reduce the effect of Alzheimer's disease by 30 percent has just been revealed at today's Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Washington, DC.

One thousand patients were given an infusion of an antibody called solanezumab once a month, over a period of one-and-a-half years, and the study has shown that the antibody significantly reduces the decline in brain function of patients in the early stages of the disease. As Dr. Eric Siemers from the Lilly Research Laboratories, in Indiana, told the BBC, "It's another piece of evidence that solanezumab does have an effect on the underlying disease pathology."

It's not a cure, but this does come as something of a breakthrough, since older Alzheimer drugs only tackle the symptoms. Now, the new drug should reduce the rate at which the disease takes over a person, meaning more people who suffer from the disease could potentially live longer.

An earlier 18-month trial of solanezumab ended in failure in 2012, but this one serves as a landmark moment—as a representative the Alzheimer's Research branch in the UK put it, if this gets replicated, then it's "a real breakthrough in Alzheimer's research."

In the UK, some 850,000 people suffer from the disease, with this number expected to rise to 1 million by 2025. Of America's top ten causes of death, Alzheimer's is the only disease that cannot be prevented, cured, or slowed. Every 67 seconds, someone in the US develops the disease. Solanezumab looks like it could at least prolong a sufferer's life span. A new trial on the antibody, to begin next year, should tell us for sure.

The trailer for 'Cartel Land'

The escape of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the head of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, from Mexico's highest security prison is a vivid symbol of the continuing saga of government failure and tragedy for the Mexican people.

I saw this failure and this tragedy first hand when shooting my documentary Cartel Land (which VICE is helping to distribute) in the Mexican state of Michoacán. I was embedded on and off for nine months with the Autodefensas, a group of vigilantes rising up to take back their endangered communities from another cartel, the Knights Templar.

The bribery and/or complicity of government officials seems the only explanation for the air-conditioned tunnel that El Chapo used to slip away from Altiplano prison (where "La Tuta," head of the Knights Templar, was also imprisoned in early 2015). But the government's endless susceptibility to corruption is part of a much larger failure: its inability to provide order, security, and law to millions of Mexican citizens who have lived through a long reign of cartel terror. Many parts of Mexico are truly lawless zones where cartels, fueled by drug money, operate with impunity and impose their vicious authority on the local people through extortion and ruthless violence. They also control most aspects of civic life—including the local police and government—with bribes, threats, intimidation, or flat-out infiltration.

Watch director Kathryn Bigelow interview the author of this article about his documentary:

Americans have become obsessed with the Islamic State (for good reason). But there is a war that is happening in our neighboring country to the south—a war that we are connected to and a war that we are funding through our consumption of illicit drugs. In an ironic twist of fate, cartels are too often glorified on TV and in narcocorridos (musical ballads that are odes to the great cartel capos). And the latest headlines about El Chapo's escape seem to miss the greater point—the grievous suffering of Mexicans from the government failure to protect its citizens. It is estimated that since 2007, as many as 80,000 people have been killed in the drug wars in Mexico and 20,000 have "disappeared." In large areas of the country, away from Mexico City, people live in deadly fear of the arbitrary and unchecked violence of the cartels—and government institutions often work in collusion with criminals, or allow them to operate with impunity.

I'll never forget my first trip to Michoacan for the film. I was on an " operativo" with the Autodefensas as they were trying to take over the town of Apo and rid it of the Knights Templar. When the vigilantes entered the town, they were almost immediately surrounded by the Army and forced to disarm. Vehicles soon arrived filled with men, women, and children—hundreds of them—threateningly wielding wooden sticks. It soon became clear that the citizens were coming from nearby towns to kick out the convoy of Mexican Army trucks—in their eyes, the Army was a corrupt institution that had, at best, been tacitly allowing the Templars to do their dirty work and, at worst, been working directly with them. This was the Army that, in a sense, is a symbol for these citizens' absolute distrust of authority, a metaphor for the breakdown of society: The helmets and guns and helicopters flying overhead evoking fear and anger and dreams of protection that never materialized.

On VICE News: 'El Chapo' Mythology Grows in Drug Lord's Home State of Sinaloa

The citizens surrounded the tanks and trucks, wooden sticks held in the air. It was chaotic. Voices yelled various profanities, calling for the Army to leave, likening them to the cartel. In the midst of it all, Maria (I've changed her name for her safety)—a beautiful young woman with tears streaming down her face—maniacally screamed at the soldiers: "You guys are dogs! Dogs who have done so much harm to us already!"

The cacophony of screaming crescendoed, helicopters continued to make laps in the sky overhead, as the crowd chanted, "The people, united, will never be defeated!" Maria, now eye-to-eye with one of the soldiers, yelled, "If what happened to us had happened to you, you would all be on our side. Why? Because of the pain we carry!" Eventually, the soldiers retreated and the Autodefensas got their weapons back and took control of the town.

After this dramatic scene, we spent time with Maria and found out why she was so emotional. Her parents and two brothers had been kidnapped by the cartel and never heard from again. Like thousands of other family members, Maria didn't know why or how or exactly that had happened. And most likely never will. She was too scared to go to the police out of fear—fear that the police would rat on her to the cartel, fear that they were on the payroll of the cartel, or fear that they frankly were the cartel.

"Do we want to die tied up like animals or dismembered like they have been doing for more than 12 years? We decided the best way to die was to die fighting."
–Jose Manuel Mireles, the leader of the Autodefensas

And that is why vigilante groups rise up, as they have throughout history and across the world today. The leader of the Autodefensas—Jose Manuel Mireles, known as "El Doctor"—told me: "When the government can't provide basic security for its people, we can take up arms in legitimate defense of our lives, our families, our properties. We are all survivors—they've attacked all of our families. They've killed, kidnapped, or raped someone we love. Every single one of us in this battle. So it's time to decide how we wish to die. Do we want to die tied up like animals or dismembered like they have been doing for more than 12 years? We decided the best way to die was to die fighting."

I found myself asking similar questions. What would I do if my family was disappeared like Maria's or my uncle was found hanging from a bridge? Would I take up arms to fight violence? Is that right? Is that just? Is vigilantism sustainable? Over nine months in Michoacán, I discovered a wide range of motivations: justice, fear, greed, revenge, power, ego. Over time, I saw the vigilantes rout the cartel and take over many towns. But a power vacuum then existed because there was still no government maintaining law and order. In that vacuum, different factions within the vigilante movement vied for power and carried out their own agendas beyond the quest for justice. Sadly, we saw some of those fighting against evil becoming evil themselves.

At first, the government allowed the vigilantes to progress because they were doing their dirty work and doing what they had been unable to do—rid Michoacán of the Templars. However, when the government did act, it tried to stop the vigilantes, rather than deal with the cartels, and then it sought to co-opt them. In doing so, the government ended up supporting factions of the vigilantes who some have alleged are essentially the new cartel in town. The lines between vigilantes, cartels and corrupt government became ever more blurred. The lines between good and evil were ever harder to see.

My documentary Cartel Land, like the escape of El Chapo, tells a story of the terrible failure of government institutions—and underscores that there is no end in sight to the tragic suffering of the Mexican people. But the story, in an unspoken way, is also about US complicity. Almost all the drugs made in Mexico are sold in the US. Americans provide virtually all the financial support for the terrible war going on in our neighboring country. We too are deeply at fault. But, of course, finding lasting solutions has eluded the well-intentioned on both sides of the border for decades. The one constant is the terrible suffering in Mexico and the lives destroyed by drugs in the United States.

My hope is to show this stark reality through Cartel Land so that people not terrorized by cartel violence can feel, viscerally and emotionally, the tragedy of government failing to do its most basic tasks.

Matthew Heineman is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in New York. His latest film Cartel Land premiered in the US Documentary Competition at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where Heineman won the Best Director Award and Special Jury Prize for Cinematography. The film is currently playing in theaters in the US and Mexico. For more information visit: cartellandmovie.com

Michele Wallace on the cover of 'Ms.' magazine, 1979. All photos courtesy of Michele Wallace.

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In 1979 Michele Wallace's face was splashed across the cover of Gloria Steinem's historic feminist publication Ms. magazine. A bolded headline, layered over 27-year-old Wallace's afro, hailed the black feminist critic's first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , as "the book that will shape the 1980s."

More than 35 years after the magazine's bold declaration, I saw Wallace for the first time, at the Malcolm X & Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. I was there to celebrate Verso's recent reissue of her seminal text, as were the 50-or-so other black women, handful of black men, and exactly two white men. All the hot black chicks in the room had their natural hair in full effect, and I happily embraced my curl-blocked view. Wallace had summoned us there on the strength of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman 's enduring critique, well past the 1980s. So much of what Wallace eviscerates in her book —the trope of the strong and/or sassy black woman who is denied her own narrative, the invisibility of black women in black male-dominated movements, the invisibility of black women in general—is only just starting to yield in 2015.

As a physical representation of the generational bridge separating the past and present, Wallace, now 63, got up in front of the crowd alongside Ebony's senior editor Jamilah Lemieux, who started the hashtag #BlackPowerIsForBlackMen. The most notable moment of the night, in my mind, was right then: when Wallace first walked onstage wearing a slinky jumpsuit, took her place on a stool in front of the microphone, and spread her legs, un-self-consciously wide, to keep her balance. I was impressed by her confidence. By the end of the talk it was clear that she got it from her 87-year-old mother, artist Faith Ringgold, who stood up from her seat in the audience during the Q&A period, plugged her own memoir, and then gave an impromptu speech to close out the night.

Wallace looking cool, 1979

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman is a bifurcated text that was the first to call out the black patriarchy. It put a name to the unspoken burden that black women bore after the civil rights movement didn't make good on its promise to liberate black women once black men had reified their manhood in the eyes of white society. (" I Am a Man! ") In the first half of the book, Wallace argues that the "black macho" rhetoric of the civil rights movement served to further marginalize black women by positioning the "independent" black woman as an obstacle to the black man's masculinity. The second half is a critique of this image of black womanhood, which is exempt from weakness and pain—the black woman as superwoman, with an inordinate strength that outpaces that of white women and even most men. It's not necessarily a fun read, but it's essential and, sadly, still relevant.

Upon the book's publication in 1978, it caused a firestorm; many prominent black male scholars refused to believe "that the significance of black women as a distinct category is routinely erased by the way in which the Women's Movement and the Black Movement choose to set their goals and recollect their histories." A year after the publication of Black Macho , one of the oldest African American academic journals, The Black Scholar , published its "Black Sexism Debate" issue. In it, critic Robert Staples penned " a response to angry black feminists " that denied sexism's existence for black women. I opened up my phone interview with Wallace using the same question that many of Wallace's initial critics, who dismissed her work as "divisive," had in the 70s and 80s. Substituting "the civil rights movement" for "Black Lives Matter," with a tired sigh: Does talking about the black patriarchy, or misogynoir, distract from the "bigger" issue of fighting white supremacy?

The answer is still of course not. Now a professor at the City College of New York, Wallace tries to sensitively make this point to her students whenever another black man becomes a news item in the worst way.

"There's always a lot of concern about police brutality and black men getting shot or beaten up by the police," she tells me. "But you also have to make it clear that these same things are happening to women. Women are also getting beaten up by the police, and they also end up in prison. I try to talk about that with my students."

"Most of the people who were killed in Charleston were women," she continues. "I do feel a certain hesitation in jumping in anyone's face who wants to interpret this as a predominantly male problem. I know people are grieving and they're upset. They're rightfully upset about things that have happened to these men, but they're just not upset about things that have happened to women." Right now, for instance, activists are tweeting to keep Sandra Bland's name known and visible, the Texas woman who was taken into police custody at a routine traffic stop and later found dead in her jail cell under mysterious circumstances.

Wallace with Cornel West, 1979. They dated!

Even before Black Macho was published there was controversy. As a black woman publishing a simultaneously personal and academic text at the tail end of feminism's second wave, Wallace was engaged in a struggle against implicit sexism and racism. Her publishers at Dial Press (who also published James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time) were even hesitant to call the book feminist at all.

"There was a pervasive situation that feminism was not viable," Wallace remembers of the months leading up to Black Macho's publication. "When it came time to promote the book, my publishers Dial Press were adamant—despite the content of the book being feminist—that the book, that I, should not be described as feminist because it would doom the book financially."

What could be worse than a feminist? A black feminist, it turns out. "My publishers insisted that feminism is dead, there's no black readers, and the ideal reader is a little old lady from Pasadena. It's hard to imagine now how completely unwilling people were to concede that there was a black reading public or that there could be one. [They thought] anyone who would buy the book would be totally turned off if I were described as a black feminist. I had to insist on that."

Wallace and West at a party in Reno, Nevada, 1979

Wallace's editors also advised her to gloss over the less "respectable" anecdotes. Throughout the original Black Macho Wallace maintains her status as a middle-class black woman who attended a private school in Harlem and was the daughter of an artist; she never mentions the time she spent at a juvenile home or the fact that her musician father died from a drug overdose, not a car crash. In the book's updated introduction from 1990, "How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now," Wallace writes that her editors "warned" her that it was "risky" to tell those stories and she acquiesced. When I ask Wallace about the ordeal, she speaks with a much more passionate sense of having been wronged, of having been limited by the threat of shame. And despite Wallace's confidence at the Verso event, this five-letter word was the central theme of the rest of our interview. Though when Wallace speaks the word, it's more like she shouts it: SHAME.

"The fact that I gone to Mexico, joined a commune, wouldn't come home, and ended up in a juvenile home was TOO SHAMEFUL," she says. "My agent and a number of people just said, 'You can tell that story later, when you're more successful. You can't afford to tell that right now.' This goes back to SHAME. Shame is a very powerful emotion and a friend of a patriarchy."

"Here I am, I'm 27 years old, I've graduated from college, I'm teaching at a university, I work at Newsweek—who would think that any of that would touch me? There was discussion among the women around me when I was writing the book that it was not safe for me to disclose that kind of information about myself. That that was going to doom me and follow me to the ends of the earth. The feeling was, 'You get one transgression in the book, and we don't even think you should have this one.'"

In the very book in which Wallace argues for the right to her flaws, she was actively denied them. I point out the irony in all of this ("Uh... I feel like that's almost exactly the thesis of The Myth of the Black Superwoman"), and we laugh about it in a depressed way. It was clear that white feminism's rallying cry, "the personal is political," didn't fully apply to the black women of the era, but Wallace remains an optimist and a believer that It Gets Better. "Now there are many young black feminists who are challenging [the politics of respectability]," Wallace says, citing Mikki Kendall, who got the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen to trend and eventually inspire an avalanche of think pieces on the inclusivity of digital feminism. Wallace also mentions Shonda Rhimes and her mission to put multifaceted black women on screen. "I'm hoping that the outcome of this will be that more and more black women are able to transgress these boundaries by calling it out and naming it," she continues. "We need to speak about our own shame. One thing about shame is that it can't survive much light. It grows on the underside, in the dark. Once you shine a light on it, it seems so small."

Gabby Bess is a staff writer at Broadly. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo still via Texas Department of Public Safety

On Friday, July 10, a 28-year-old Black Lives Matter activist named Sandra Bland was pulled over near Houston for failing to use her blinker. According to her version of events, she was only trying to get away from a cop who had sped up behind her and started riding her tail. When the Texas Department of Public Safety officer, Brian T. Encinia, asked why she was irritated, what should have been a relatively peaceful exchange turned into a horror show of an arrest.

Three days after Bland was taken to jail, she was found hanging dead in her cell. Although a medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, the suburban Chicago native's friends and family are crying foul. After all, the whole reason she was in the Lone Star state was for a job interview—which she reportedly nailed. Why would someone about to start a new job off herself out of nowhere? That question quickly became a social media rallying cry, with people all over the country asking #WhatHappenedToSandraBland?

Even though the Waller County Sheriff's Department released dashcam footage of the arrest Tuesday in an apparent act of transparency, doing so not put the case to rest. The Bland stop comes about two minutes into the nearly hour-long video, which begins with a far more vanilla interaction between Encinia and a college student—who, incidentally, gets off with a gentle warning.

Bland, meanwhile, immediately draws Encinia's ire by expressing frustration at the stop and refusing to put out her cigarette. After she's forced out of the car, we hear Bland claim off-camera that her wrist is being bent to the point of almost breaking and that she's had her head slammed into the ground so hard she can no longer hear. She repeatedly asks the cop if he feels like a "real man" and calls him an "asshole" and a "pussy."

What's more, the video shows Encinia violating Texas Department of Public Sagety policy, according to the the agency's director, Steven McCraw. It shows Encinia threatening to "light [Bland] up" with a Taser and responding "good" when she says she has epilepsy. Stoking the controversy, the video appears at first brush to be edited—and poorly. If the evidence was doctored and is still so fucked up, what actually happened in the uncut version? (The Texas Department of Public Safety early Wednesday told a reporter with the Texas Tribune that the video got messed up because of a technical snafu and they would re-upload it.)

But if the footage is both frustrating and heartbreaking, what happened early on Monday, July 13, is obviously worse. Officials say that Bland refused breakfast that Monday morning around 6:30 AM, asked to make a phone call, and then was found dead around 9:30. Security footage shows no one entering her cell that morning.

Meanwhile, the FBI and the Texas Rangers are still conducting their own investigations into the incident. Bland's family called for an independent autopsy that was completed on Sunday. The results have not yet been released.

Encinia sat in his cruiser mulling over what to charge Bland with once she was in custody. Despite the violent arrest, he seems to be in high spirits. "I don't have serious bodily injury, but I was kicked," he laughs, according to the dashcam audio. "I don't know if it'd be [resisting arrest] or if it'd be assault, you know?"

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This child is so disappointed by Scott's use of prefab press releases. Photo via Facebook

It's pre-election season, which means the press releases from all candidates and funding announcements from incumbents are coming out fast and furious. They're coming out so fast from the Conservative Party, in fact, that many of them are pre-written, sent to MPs with blanks left for area-specific information. We learned this courtesy of Nova Scotia MP Scott Armstrong, who represents the riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley and whose communications spokesperson sent out a press release draft—with the spaces for individuals MPs to fill in still underlined and in bright red.

"The Royal Canadian Legion Amherst Branch 10 is receiving $ 19,500 through the Enabling Accessibility Fund (EAF) to improve accessibility for Canadians with disabilities," reads the Mad Libs-style release, with the name of the building and funding amount originally left blank. Armstrong's name and constituency were also written in red.

Screenshot via Document Cloud

Armstrong said the release "shouldn't have gone out that way," and that he couldn't see the red text because he was on an old computer, but he also admitted the practice isn't uncommon. "For the accessibility announcements, they do a template and what you try to do is adapt it and try to match the announcement that you're making in that particular area," he said. When CBC googled the first line of the release, omitting just the location, the top results were for four other Conservative MPs.

The similarities don't end with boilerplate details about the EAF or even the Economic Action Plan, however. The press releases also share quotes that are attributed to different people on different releases. A line attributed to Armstrong on his release was apparently also said, word for word, by Federal Employment and Social Development Minister Pierre Poilievre; Poilievre is quoted on the press release that came out of Pickering-Scarborough East MP Corneliu Chisu's office.

While the accidental release of this draft raises a number of questions about the extent to which Conservative messaging is controlled by the party (possibly meaning individual candidates and MPs have little power to respond to their specific constituents' concerns), the strangest part of all of this is that a sitting MP is using a computer so old he can't see red text on it.

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Toronto got a little better looking thanks to this mural. Photo via Tobin Grimshaw

Parr Etidloie has been asked several times what he wants people to understand when they look at a massive mural he and his friends painted on a wall in downtown Toronto.

"There's a town called Cape Dorset in Nunavut," is his best answer.

Cape Dorset is separated from Toronto by three degrees latitude, 23 degrees Celsius, 2,294 kilometres, history, and many statistics.

Those statistics can make your head spin. The suicide rate in Nunavut is ten times the national average and it has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. Life expectancy for men is ten years shorter than average. In the last census, the unemployment rate of Cape Dorset was 22 percent. The high school drop out rate is more than 40 percent. Drugs and depression are more common than in the rest of Canada, as is physical and sexual abuse.

But Cape Dorset is also known as the Inuit Art Capital of the World. The federal government has boasted that 90 percent of the population over 15 years of age is involved in arts and crafts. But to Latch Akesuk, Audi Qinnuayuaq, Parr Etidloie, and Cie Taqiasuq, Cape Dorset is just "my hometown."

They like to point out how much things cost there in comparison to the south: smokes are twice the price, a half-litre can of cherry-lime-flavoured ice tea is 12 or 13 bucks, and a gram of weed can go for $80 or more if town is fogged in and supplies have run out.

Toronto artists Patrick Thompson and Alexa Hatanaka met the teens last year when they painted a mural on the side of the elementary school in Cape Dorset as part of a youth initiative they founded called Embassy of Imagination.

Murals don't paint themselves. Photo by author

This summer, the pair brought Akesuk, Qinnuayuaq, Etidloie, and Taqiasuqto to Toronto for nearly three weeks to create their own mural down south. The mural almost didn't materialize—despite the $60,000 in grants in place from the City of Toronto, Heritage Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and other partners—because the original site fell through. However, Thompson and Hatanaka—who have spent a decade working on arts projects in Arctic communities—found a new, better wall at Church Street near King Street just days before the teens arrived.

This past Thursday, the 18-metre mural was completed. It's a vibrant image of an old man carrying the weight of the world on his back: a broken-down snowmobile, a walrus, a caribou, dogs and fish, human faces and human hands. The concept came from a story Etidloie likes to tell about his grandfather lugging a snowmobile home across the ice.

Besides painting, the trip south involved a crash course in cultural studies. Andrew Hunter, the Art Gallery of Ontario's Canadian curator spent a Sunday giving the teens a special tour. His priority at the AGO, he explained, is Indigenous artwork, which is given a place of prominence in the Canadian gallery.

One of the main things that held the quartet's attention during their visit was a 2012 drawing called Cape Dorset From Above by Shuvinai Ashoona. Standing in front of it, they pointed out their school and the airport, the co-op store and the graveyard. A Charlie Ugyuk sculpture and a drawing by Tim Pitsiulak—just "a guy from town," according to Taqiasuq—also commanded a few moments' pause.

The rest of the time, they argued in Inuktitut and horsed around, shuffling along in matching pairs of cheap slide flip-flops that were acquired by a friend of Thompson and Hatanaka. At the end of the tour, Qinnuayuaq shyly presented Hunter a three-layer linocut of a polar bear.

At the National Gallery of Canada the weekend before, a similar tour of Inuit art took place in the archives. It hit closer to home. The national gallery holds nearly three dozen stone cuts and graphite drawings by Parr, 16-year-old Etidloie's great-great-grandfather and namesake.

"It was amazing. It was cool to see his real work, not a print," he said. It was Thompson who told him the man was famous. It's not something he learned at home.

His ancestor's stone cuts portray the hunt: dog teams, geese, walrus, and women swaddled against the cold. The work, which was even posthumously made into an official postage stamp, depicts "an old man's love for a disappearing way of life," according to a west coast gallery that once displayed his work.

Artists Cie Taqiasuq and Parr Etidloie. Photo by the author.

In Ottawa, Etidloie sold a few soapstone inukshuks for $20—cigarette money. His father was also a well-known artist, a carver, but the son learned the technique from friends.

Isaac Etidloie died last year from pills and alcohol. "My dad didn't really care about us. He lived in Iqaluit. I was OK with it because my grandparents feel like they're my parents," said the junior Etidloie.

Etidloie, who drew the original outline of his grandfather for the mural, can only make a buck here and there. He can't get a job because he doesn't have a social insurance number or a birth certificate. He said he was born without a name.

Taqiasuq, 17, painted the walrus. His grandfather taught him how to draw, and how to hunt. They used to go out on the land for months at a time but he said they don't do that much anymore. Taqiasuq should have graduated this year from high school but found the Alberta curriculum too tough and needs another English credit. He wants to stay in the north, maybe go to college. He misses the water back home.

Qinnuayuaq, 15, painted the dogs, fish and hands and Akesuk, 14, painted the caribou. While working on the mural, they often stressed everyone out by disappearing, but otherwise kept pretty quiet.

Maybe there's not much to say. This little crew, while most of them have recognized artists in their families, have faced more than their share of tragedy. An 11-year-old boy they knew well committed suicide just days before his birthday last year. Parents have died mysteriously, left home, fell into the bottle. In some cases, those parents left a legacy of trauma, neglect, and abuse before their exit.

Thompson is trying to keep them motivated. "It's not your everyday school trip for these kids. They deserve a different kind of approach," Thompson said.

"People who have been through the worst, if they can make it through to the other side and be self-sufficient, could be so useful in chaperoning the next generation. To be leaders," Thompson said. "So how do you help them get through this part of their lives so they don't eat themselves alive like so many other people?"

In Cape Dorset, art isn't just a hobby, or an escape. It's a viable industry. The famous Kinngait Studios has produced countless artists, many of whom have reached international acclaim. But in a place where a substantial portion of the population—one in five, according to the territory's tourism board—considers making art their job, there is no full-time, dedicated art program.

"It seems odd there isn't the framework there for young people to make art and explore things on their own terms," Hatanaka said.

"Some of these kids don't really have an outlet. They don't really want to go home after school. They want to do something. It seems pretty obvious that would be a positive and useful thing to develop: creativity."

In the north, young people are the most at risk, said Allison Crawford, program director of the Northern Psychiatric Outreach Program through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Crawford works often in the Baffin region and was called in to Cape Dorset when the 11-year-old died. Social explanations for suicide among Indigenous Canadians include historical trauma related to colonialism as well as abuse and addiction.

"People suffer greatly from all that loss. They are so burdened by it," she said. "But there are no activities for kids. People recoiled into their own individual ways of dealing with it. There are no collective ways."

Art projects like this can strengthen identity and resilience and provide meaningful work, and can transform traumatic experiences for individuals in a way that's manageable and useful, she said. It can also have a positive "ripple effect" for families and the small town itself.

After this, Hatanaka and Thompson move on to other big projects: an installation at Way Home Festival north of Toronto, a mural in Inukjuak, Quebec, a piece in Denver, Colorado.

Akesuk, Qinnuayuaq, and Taqiasuq are heading home next week. Etidloie is setting sail for Greenland as part of an expedition excursion for which he won a scholarship, and he believes he can finish high school in Ontario. He loves his hometown but knows he needs to get out for a while. He wants to be a pilot some day.

The mural is titled Piliriqatigiingniq, meaning "to work together towards a common goal." It will remain for at least five years and soon a plaque will be installed bearing the names of the artists in both English and Inuktitut.

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Prime Minister David Cameron at an FCO drinks reception. Photo via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As the dust starts to settle on David Cameron's speech delivered in Birmingham on Monday on the "struggle of our generation" against "extremism," it's probably a suitable time to look back and note that, for all the hype and build-up, the Prime Minister didn't say anything new.

To recap, Cameron gave a speech against the "poison" infecting young minds in which he said that the police, schools, mosques, broadcasters, prisoners, and parents all have to do more to defeat extremism. Pretty much everyone, it seems, except the government themselves. He also singled out my organization, the National Union of Students (NUS) for "shame" because our members voted to work with CAGE—an Islamic NGO that works to oppose the "War on Terror," directed by former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg.

What this amounts to is further, deeper, more conclusive confirmation of what has become painfully evident to most us for a long time already—that under the guise of "counter-terrorism" we in the UK are facing the greatest threat to civil liberties in a generation, that the British government is pursuing its steady descent into a police state unabated, and that the sun never sets on the arrogance of the British Empire.

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From jump, Cameron set out a strategy designed to fail. It won't work because it's embedded in the divisive and discredited idea that what Britain is facing is primarily an ideological threat—that of "Islamist extremism." Without even stopping to consider the material reality and circumstances from which such movements as the Islamic State develop and draw strength, and Britain's role in fomenting that—ie. a fairly consistent recent history of bombing Muslim countries—this Government has decided that the solution is to wage war for (and on) the minds of Muslim people in the UK, and recondition them in the doctrine of British values.

This is instead of engaging with the long, long list of grievances held by people, including Muslim people, in the UK regarding the government's domestic and foreign policy—an idea rejected out of hand by Cameron.

Apparently the notion that the state-sponsored witch-hunt of Muslims under the Prevent agenda might fuel resentment against Britain is "deluding ourselves." Ditto the brutal austerity measures consigning Black and Muslim communities to grinding poverty, and the dismissal of half a million in the people on the streets last summer protesting Britain's role in the Israeli occupation (not to mention myriad other cases in the Global South)—none of that stuff could possibly be to blame, it seems.

Under the newly-statutory Prevent agenda, Muslims in Britain will find themselves fully pathologized, criminalized, and targeted by every arm of the state and private sector. Most perversely, with the extension of Prevent into the education and healthcare sectors, Muslims will be—and have been—marked out as "at threat of radicalization" by their schoolteachers for questioning the oppression they face, their lecturers for speaking out against the oppression they face, and by their psychologists when the crushing burden gets too much, and they succumb to the oppression they are subjected to.

In casually dismissing the "grievance justification" by pointing out that 9/11 preceded the Iraq invasion he has highlighted the willful historical amnesia of his government—the UK and the West's destructive presence in Black and Muslim lands extends far beyond the occupation of Iraq. And with more and more of Britain's citizens being descendants of people colonised or invaded by Britain, the memory of this nation's injustices and brutality against their ancestors and relatives runs deep and vivid.

As long as the effects of that history continue to color the reality of Black people in the UK here today, demanding that they all identify with and embrace Britain and "Britishness" will simply not happen as long as the government keeps up its feigned ignorance.

While Muslim people in the UK appeared to be, in varying degrees, the object or the target of his speech, the greatest disrespect is that he claims to be able to speak on behalf of us and our communities without ever having properly engaged with Muslims beyond the counsel of sycophants and sell-outs validating his lies and slander.

Meanwhile the National Union of Students, which I represent as Black Students' Officer, is derisively name-checked for allying with organizations like CAGE—organizations which approach the issues at hand with some degree of nuance and offer some hope to resolving these conflicts, and which are quickly misrepresented and subject to a racialized, Islamophobic witch-hunt.

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It's pretty ironic that David Cameron praised NUS's "noble history of campaigning for justice"—while he violated the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa while NUS was campaigning for the movement in the 1980s, and whilst his government is more than happy to continue arming and defending Israel while NUS is campaigning for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against it.

What remains is that we're hearing nothing new. The dangerous intolerance of the state grows day by day, but the toxic rhetoric and patent falsehoods have remained the same across governments, for over a decade now.

What these old ideas need, however, is a new response. As students or as people in the UK, we need to find a new way of articulating our opposition. We need to avoid the pitfalls of the past, which validated or undergirded the state narrative, or left Muslim communities to defend themselves alone.

The urgency of action needed to reject the government's agenda can't be stressed enough. This affects all communities, all oppressed and minority groups. As we build against it, we should be highlighting this and therefore taking it on from all angles.

We need to be mobilizing nationally with the strongest, most principled unity, but the conversation starts within each of our own communities and campuses—and those conversations are needed now more than ever because the reality is, it doesn't get worse than this.

Malia Bouattia is NUS Black Students' Officer

All screens from 'Dark Souls III' via Xbox Wire

Fans of the From Software's Souls series got pretty much everything they could have wished for at this year's E3. Not only was Dark Souls III unveiled, but it was also confirmed that Hidetaka Miyazaki, the much-lauded director of Dark Souls who gave up the reins of the sequel to make Bloodborne, would be back in charge of proceedings. It was like Christmas morning, only one where the presents are all deadly traps and your relatives have started finishing their sentences with deeply unsettling laughter.

But since then, feelings towards DSIII have turned to trepidation. Now that the hype has died down, and we've all acknowledged that the second Souls is the weakest of the series, an early 2016 release for the third game means that development time is short. Only a year, give or take a month or two, will separate Dark Souls III from Bloodborne, with many of the former's creative team drawn from the talent behind the latter critical and commercial hit. Miyazaki, now installed at president of From, has promised longer gaps between Souls games in the future, to allow for revitalizing breathing space. But Dark Souls III will be on us before we know it, so here are some suggestions for its makers to heed, if they're to produce the very best Souls game yet, against the odds.

LINK THE MAP

"Linked maps are my favorite," Miyazaki said at E3, which was music to the ears of Souls fans. The world of Lordran, from the original Dark Souls, has a unique sense of place that's often cited as the key to what made the game special. But whereas Lordran was a masterpiece of design, an ingeniously interconnected realm of sadness and chaos, the sequel's Drangleic was more a series of disconnected levels. The infamous lift from Earthen Peak, a huge structure in a barren valley, inexplicably leading up to a realm of volcanic lava, is the most egregious example of its lack of logic.

The smaller design choices were also what made Lordran feel so magical—every enemy and collectable item in Dark Souls is placed with care, providing hints towards the game's arcane lore. On DSII things were much more scattershot. Grave Wardens in the Undead Crypt makes sense, but what were they doing in Earthen Peak? Even the rabid Souls community couldn't dream up a reason. That lack of attention to detail caused a gnawing sense that things weren't quite what they could have been.

RECAPTURE THE SIGNATURE SENSE OF RUINED BEAUTY

There was a now-famous exchange between Miyazaki and one of his designers while making Dark Souls that perfectly sums up his sensibilities. On being presented with an early design of the Gaping Dragon boss, which had been sketched as a Resident Evil–style grotesque horror, he responded by saying: "This isn't dignified. Don't rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can't you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?"

You have to wonder what he made of DSII's The Rotten, a creature made of hundreds of rotting corpses smushed into one disgusting bloody cleaver-wielding mass. Throughout DSII you could sense the absence of Miyazaki's guiding hand, with many of its bosses missing that weird grace that the Souls' best possess. Their design also fell into the pattern of big-humanoid-creature-with-even-bigger-weapon a few times too many—From needs some inspiration to stop players feeling like they've seen it all before in DSIII.

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FINISH THE DAMN GAME

The Scholar of the First Sin expansion for DSII was a strange thing—a remixed version of the game with a smattering of added content it was, in itself, rather good. But coming so soon after the original release it smacked of From trying to hastily fix their mistakes and add some polish that should have been present at launch. Its release also split the player base—SotFS players can't interact with those running the vanilla version. This is poison for a game that thrives on its unique multiplayer. Up until this point From was one of the few developers doing DLC right. SotFS was a blow to that reputation—and if they can't get it right first time around on DSIII, they could lose the fanbase's faith altogether.

BE CAREFUL WHEN RETREADING THE PAST

There were large chunks of DSII that were more or less reskinned parts of its predecessor—Blighttown had its analogue in The Gutter, Heide's Tower of Flame looked a lot like Anor Londo, and so on. It is suggested that the realm of Drangleic is actually the land of Lordran set thousands of years later, which is a decent excuse for all the similarities, but the longer you played DSII the more the same enemies and locations started to feel less like welcome déjà vu and more like lazy design. There are strong clues in the E3-shown DSIII trailer that point to the forthcoming game taking place in the same locations yet again, but From need to get the balance between nodding to the past and cynically reusing assets right this time.

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DROP THE EARLY GAME FAST TRAVEL

In DSII the ability to warp between bonfires, something only available in the later stages of the original, was available from the off. It may sound masochistic to ask for something so handy to be removed, but for many this ability spoiled the rhythm of the game. The Souls series' difficulty is more than just a badge for hardcore gamers to show off – it's key to their appeal. There's something about the lonely trudge through such relentless cruelty that gives the games their grim charm. Dark Souls' most infamous area, Blighttown, would not have been quite so notorious if players were able to beat a hasty retreat to wherever they liked when things got tough. Making the game more accessible is no bad thing—Souls' popularity has skyrocketed since Demon's Souls launched the series on the PS3, and there's nothing wrong with making things more welcoming to newcomers. But giving them a watered-down version of the game is robbing them of the true Souls experience.

'Dark Souls III,' E3 2015 announcement trailer

KEEP TWEAKING THE COMBAT

If this all sounds damning to DSII, it's worth remembering that it's still a very good game that only struggles to impress when set in the shadow of two great ones. And it did take the series forward in terms of its mechanics—the faster, more versatile combat was brilliantly realized, and the addition of dual wielding gave the more adventurous a chance to play in a more attack-minded fashion. The early showings of DSIII suggests that From has made further tweaks to enable even more varied play styles, and there will no doubt be lessons learnt from the very aggressively focused Bloodborne added to the mix. The combat in Souls is amongst the most precise and most challenging in gaming, and with each iteration From has managed to improve it. If the studio can do so again, while returning to the detailed world building and creativity of the first two Souls games, then Dark Souls III could well be their finest hour yet. Could.

Follow Jamie Jones on Twitter.

Prison is dangerous. If this surprises you, congratulations on being the most sheltered person alive! Depictions of incarceration often sensationalize it, but there is unmistakable bloodshed in prison air. The tension is palpable.

Whenever you go to the yard, there's always a chance you won't make it back.

The obvious explanation for violence in prison is the character of its inhabitants. Having neglected their end of Rousseau's Social Contract and ignored the Golden Rule, these are men we've decided must be segregated from society. But what is to be done with them while they are on ice, so to speak? The official goal of rehabilitation doesn't quite square with the punitive reality. The inmates at New York State maximum security prisons, like the four big houses I served seven years inside, are mostly men with violent pasts. I ate many a meal with a murderer sitting on either side of me. Most were "framed" (according to them), some said they were justified, but none appeared especially repentant. At least not after a while.

I felt my own contrition slip away until only the pain I caused my family remained. Feeling degraded, hungry, and cold eroded my initial sense of deserving my sentence of two years each for five robbery convictions. It was finally knocked out of me completely when a guard beat me with my own boot while I was frisked. That was because I had given it to him with my right hand rather than my left, though the hack took the shoe I passed without comment—he didn't want me to expect the punishment. The hard part was separating the law from its enforcers. Besides, I always knew right from wrong, and compromised my very identity by pretending otherwise.

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While the guards can make life miserable for an inmate, actual death isn't meted out by New York State's Department of Corrections (DOC). The Empire State's electric chair hasn't been used since 1963, although the cops let me sit in it as a reward for keeping my mouth shut on one occasion when I clerked for a set of prison staff who managed the wing for the mentally ill. They were good at their jobs, patient and humane, because each of them had a child with difficulties like the inmates in their charge, minus the felonies. But their unusual capacity to see prisoners as people made them vulnerable to inmates' agendas and less than popular with their peers. A full investigation was launched when one cop's radio was stolen, with my employers as the targets, and I was called in for interrogation. Although I was offered many enticements to talk, I valued their treatment of me as a human more and returned the favor. The anonymity I was promised was as much of a joke as I suspected; my bosses immediately knew—and were grateful for my conduct.

After arriving at the jail complex on Riker's Island, New York City's hellhole of a floating detention facility, I saw many men with scarred faces.

They also nearly scared me to death on the day I sat in the electric chair by pulling the switch, which I did not know to be inoperative. I didn't die and should've guessed: ends from causes unnatural are rarely care of the state. Almost all incarcerated violence I saw was perpetrated by prisoners against other inmates; "green on green crime" was the moniker used in my state system, since our uniforms were a lovely shade between verdant and viridescent.

Immediately after arriving at the jail complex on Riker's Island, New York City's hellhole of a floating detention facility, I saw many men with scarred faces—some of them very young, already with ruined mugs. There were even names for the cuts: Ear to mouth was a "telephone slash," acquired for and while using previously-claimed phone. Cuts down the face (and preferably in a matching set) were "curtains," supposedly marking a snitch subsequently left to peek through drapery that never goes away. The worst were the keloid scars, fat lumps of worm caused by a slash with a "double-ox"—two razors close enough together to make healing unforgettable and mirrors unpopular.

Getting cut is ridiculously easy on Rikers Island, which was my home for the nine months it took for the State and my lawyer to agree on a number of years I'd serve as punishment for committing a spree of amateur robberies with a pocket knife. The New York Post dubbed me the "Apologetic Bandit" for my contrition at the scene of the crime, but the judge still gave me ten years and three months. For rehabilitation, of course.

I did not get cut. I got lucky.

"Blooding in" went out of fashion a few years before my arrest. That was ugly; adolescents who had just arrived looked for easy targets unable to take revenge and unlikely to be avenged by others. The way I heard it, the logic behind the custom's demise was a practical response to the fact that inmates were getting additional years for hurting other inmates. A generation back, jailhouse violence was almost exclusively punished by solitary confinement and informal corporal punishment—but after the crack epidemic and the resulting influx of prisoners, suddenly you were liable to be punished for breaking the rules with both solitary confinement (a.k.a. the "box") and further prosecution.

As recently as the 1970s, I've been told, even if you killed your cellmate, you were likely to be dealt with only by prison authorities. By the 80s, however, conviction for a "jail body" got you roughly half the time you'd get for murdering someone in the wider world.

There's a certain knack to slashing someone with a cigarette filter.

Even during my time inside, the cops openly joked that convicts who killed other convicts deserved time off for good behavior. And inmates and officers both generally prefer corporal punishment to adding more years to sentences. Most guards who are experienced enough to compare results seemed to think that inmates best learn to not cause future paperwork and clean-ups via an old-fashioned beatdown. Thanks to the departed preference for "hands on" justice (and its enforcement), I met middle-aged men who had killed three or four times in their youth and would still see the free world one day—as long as they didn't smoke and ate right.

The current regime, however, treats crimes committed in prison identically to those in freedom. I didn't mind this state of affairs, even if the old-time tough guys talked of the end of prison having a law of its own, like outlaws mourning the passing of the Wild West. However, breaking precedent by applying the laws of the land to prisons has either caused or at least coincided with a drop in violence. As Slate has reported, "Murder has been declining in correctional facilities for decades—just like the murder rate in the free population, but more dramatically. In 1980, the homicide rate in state prisons was 54 inmates per 100,000. The homicide rate for the general population in 1980 was 10.2 per 100,000)."

But don't let those statistics fool you into believing prison is safe. Just walking among men fated to die behind the wall cheapens your life.

They're already dead and would love for you to join them.

Gambling, drugs, and chumps—I was told by many an old convict that avoiding these three things would keep me safe. Debts from the poker table and credit from drug dealers often end in violence; if the debtor has any hope of paying, he will be beaten just enough to scare him into prioritizing it, but not enough to send him to protective custody. However, if it is clear that the debts acquired have no hope of being repaid, the sum is "paid in blood." The losses have to be written off, but the lender saves face by ruining the borrower's. Deadliest is the vehemence of assaults over affairs of the heart: Jealousy is magnified in the limited, loveless incarcerated world. The affection of another human becomes worth dying for.

As much as I love the New Yorker, one day I will tell David Remnick, its editor, that his weekly is printed on stock too light to deflect knives made of brass, plastic, or wood—though it will stop aluminum.

Razors for cutting are the preserve of county jails and medium-security compounds. In maxes, it's icepicks for "ventilation," "guns" for "shooting,""shivs" for shanking and "ratchets" for "airing out." Prisoners have always invented their own uses for words; these are all descriptions of stabbing someone with a homemade knife. Without even intending to go all the way, poking a victim's torso can take him "off the count"—which is to say end his life. A man I knew was murdered over a debt of two packs of Newports because his assailant didn't know anatomy, and managed to puncture both lungs from behind. Neither party was over 25.

Simple precautions can help you reach your thirties, like knowing when to wear armor.

Whenever self-defense was necessary, I had no shortage of the materials. Metal detectors guard the doors to every prison yard, leaving newspaper as the easiest way to protect yourself. Many layers of the weak paper can be strapped to the torso tight enough to fit under a shirt. Magazines were preferable: I subscribed to nine in prison, and some were better than others. As much as I love the New Yorker, one day I will tell David Remnick, its editor, that his weekly is printed on stock too light to deflect knives made of brass, plastic, or wood—though it will stop aluminum.

Using weapons that can pass through a metal detector is for amateurs; the real steel is already in the yard. Only several layers of National Geographic have a chance of saving you from an experienced "shooter's" "gun," sharpened on concrete and hidden deep in the earth. Cops search the yard with handheld metal detectors only to uncover strategically concealed arms, not even protected from rust with oil and plastic bags. These seasonal searches come up with the dummies meant to be found—old shanks with no edge. Harvesting the useless props lets prison guards show results without digging deep enough to find the real thing. (In my experience, it takes at least eight inches of soil to shield steel from the detectors.)

Should you find yourself at the wrong end of a shank, deservedly or not, there is no shame in making a run for anything that will even the odds. In the myths of gentlemen gangsters, noble convicts brought two guns, ensuring the shootout was between equally-matched parties. In ten years, I never saw such chivalry, though plenty of men never came in from the yard.

They were mostly stabbed in the back.

Rocks are available in any prison yard that hasn't been asphalted over, and can be a lifesaver. The weight plates composing the dumbbells in the yard are welded together, so those who can swing them are already formidable; there aren't any lighter than 30 pounds. Mario, my first cellmate, was strong enough to wield one. Massive, fat, and fiendishly strong, he wasn't the easiest cellmate to live with. On top of being over 300 pounds, he was the son of a "made man," and played the Guinea Gangster character to the hilt (and as well as anyone in the movies). Mario chomped stogies and ate his pasta with "gravy," but he forgot that old men can still give orders.

One night, Mario never came in from the yard.

It was two Irishmen who cost him half his tongue. They were doing a favor for the bosses of the Italian court—or prison-yard club—whom Mario had insulted. The acreage of the yard was claimed like the telephones—other tenants were the Asian, Brooklyn, and both Latin King and Blood courts. There was only a small patch of neutral in the middle, for the guys who couldn't join any courts because of their loose lips or bad cases. (The child molesters and snitches didn't enjoy the yard all that much, period.) Joining a court meant it had your back, but you also implicitly volunteered for its army. As a member of the Irish court, during one high-tension period I not only taped some fine photojournalism to my torso, but was also issued a scalpel from the armory. After a while nothing happened; one guy cut himself and I peeled off an issue to read about the Himalayas.

A man who was very lightly stabbed broke his eyeglasses apart and used the arms as a set of picks to reduce his enemy to a pin cushion.

My cellmate spent all of a week getting to know the goombas before announcing that as the son of a mafia capo-regime, he would head up the Italian court as its captain. They disagreed. Mario spat on the court in outrage. The symbolic violation could only be cured with blood. My first bunkie was stabbed through his cheek during my first month in the place. Bleeding in torrents, he managed to dig up a rock and hunt for his assailants. The sheer amount of blood caused the cops to notice and catch him before he succeeded, but his effort was impressive. Knowing where the rocks were was only one of the lessons I learned from the incident.

Mario wouldn't finger anybody, but snitches gave up the story. The two Irishmen who did the deed were taken to a hearing where they were supposed to be found guilty of violating the facility rules prohibiting face-stabbing in preparation for an indictment for assault in the first degree—if the district attorney couldn't manage attempted murder. Things didn't get that far. Mario couldn't speak while his tongue healed, but he could write. The whole prison knew the five words he spelled out: "NEVER SEEN THESE IRISH COCKSUCKERS."

That was my second lesson: how to not just stay alive, but live justly.

Man's ingenuity can weaponize anything. Years later, I witnessed a grueling 20-minute duel play out under the cops' noses. A man who was very lightly stabbed broke his eyeglasses apart and used the arms as a set of picks to reduce his enemy to a pin cushion. You can beat a man to death with a rolled-up magazine, as European soccer hooligans know full well. Convicts separated by cages fight using degradation; urinating into your sock and smacking it with precision (rather than force) against the grate offers a dozen chances to spray your target. (Of course, your enemy also has a bladder and a sock of his own.) Of all the tussles I saw, it was the kick fights to which handcuffed enemies are reduced that were most violent. The loser is the one who loses balance.

The neatest trick I saw is one I've never managed myself. There's a certain knack to slashing someone with a cigarette filter. Guys have demonstrated the technique in every prison yard I've been in: Simply uncase half of the fibers, set them alight, and once they burn for a few seconds, drop the butt on the ground and stamp it flat. It makes a small black edge that is hard, sharp, and jagged. I never time it right, either failing to flatten an undercooked butt or melting the whole thing. Should you wish to learn, YouTube has a guide, albeit one that suggests using a contraband knife to cut the filter open—limiting its utility for those behind bars.

Of course, I didn't have to trust my life solely to magazine armor or makeshift blades. I defended myself with a rapier wit—though I never dared say rapier out loud in prison, considering the loathing heaped on sex offenders. Over the course of my sentence, I spent a combined year in the box, and that's where I got my best writing in. The DOC found me transparent, wobbly, and short excuses for a writing implement; I used to use up one "flexipen" a week. By carefully wrapping it down from the nub with magazine pages, I at least had something to write with that was firm, of appropriate length, and no longer translucent. But every time my cell was searched, the cops disassembled my quills, and for good reason: My modifications allowed me to do much more than write with a flexipen.

I had weaponized it.

Follow Daniel Genis on Twitter.

All photography by Jake Tucker

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"I'm going to roll up my sleeves, because I know you don't trust me."

Randy Pitchford is midway through his keynote to open Brighton's Develop, a gathering of (mostly) independent games-makers from around the world, held to share inspirations and initiate new working relationships. He's performing a magic trick. The room is equal parts amused and confused. Keynotes are supposed to set the tone of an event, and the Gearbox Software CEO (and, it turns out, former magician) seems to be leading with a trick based on three-card monte.

Some applaud, while others in the audience send snarky tweets. Why is this the keynote?

The magic routine is a trick, too, a feint, leading to a greater point about how developers can catch a lot of flak for their games. It's a thinly veiled reference to the vocal criticism that Gearbox, and therefore Randy himself, has attracted across the internet in recent years and months, delivered under the speech title of "Why We Fight." The talk is enthusiastic, self-deprecating, and tonally confused. And however much he might highlight those players who've loved Gearbox's critically panned productions, no amount of Pledge will ever polish the epic turds that were Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever.

Moving swiftly on: What was the best thing about Develop 2015?

Maybe it was the positive future the event spelled out for the gaming industry. British culture minister Ed Vaizey took to the stage to confirm the government's continued commitment to video games, highlighting the success of tax credits (which we looked into last year) before reeling off some impressive stats.

"UK consumer spending on games is almost £4 billion [$6.25 billion]," he said. "The games industry has contributed almost £1.5 billion [$2.3 billion] in gross value added to the UK economy, and almost 25,000 jobs. I hope it's the case that tax breaks are helping projects go ahead that wouldn't otherwise have happened—and certainly not in the UK. There has been an explosion of games companies: the number has grown by a fifth every year since 2011, according to NESTA, driven by mobile games."

While the UK government might not get games, necessarily, it does get money. Vaizey described the UK as one of the "world leaders" in games, and claims that they're as important to British culture as cinema.

Important games people having an important party at Games by the Sea. (Note the drink tickets, always note the drink tickets.)

Maybe it's because I've been doing this a long time, but presentations that come pitched as "Big $ in Japan" or "Monetizing Free-To-Play" trigger my cynicism alarm. But the behind-the-scenes look at how games get made that Develop provides is invaluable for many of the executives and business owners that attend. And if it all sounds a little dry compared to the gaming spectaculars of E3 and Gamescom and so on, it's worth noting that there's a great deal to like about Develop even if you're not in the process of actually making your own game, or paying for one to get produced.

I know I found much enjoy, anyway, despite the focus on the bottom line. Mediatonic developer and Heavenstrike Rivals lead writer Ed Fear showed pictures of Taylor Swift during a presentation on greater narrative design; Maia-maker Simon Roth enthused about treating employees like actual people; and Vlambeer's Rami Ismail managed to attract the attention of Gamergate's Sauron-like Eye by pronouncing in his rousing second-day keynote: "We are developers, not gamers. It's okay to admit this."

These are passionate people that are serious about what they do. But they're also people that it's easy to identify with. So, while it might be "the business" that gives Develop its brain, it's the people who show up that resonate longest. They're the ones that give this event a heart. And that's its best part.

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From the enthusiastic first-time journalist handing out business cards in the press room to the speakers and indie developers showing their games on the floor, coming to an event like Develop lets you meet so many incredible people under one (albeit rather large, Hilton-branded) roof. Its impact can be seen around town. Central Brighton's not particularly big, so the ripple effect from Develop taking place in one of its larger hotels turns the city into a sea of games-folk. Every lunch is taken with friends, and every evening there's a different party to go to. You're always meeting people, be they old friends reconnected with over a drink or entirely new ones who share your love for an amazing new game.

The first game I see at Develop is Spilt Milk Studios' Tango Fiesta. Company founder Andrew Smith has rented out the boardroom of a hotel several doors down from the Hilton Metropole housing Develop. Tango Fiesta is running on a laptop resting on the room's table, with wires and controllers sprawled out across its surface like it's some kind of Wi-Fi-enabled octopus.

Smith is as excited about his game as he is about the 80s movies he's ripping off, left, right, and center, for its source material. "I've tried to put a pun in every line of dialogue so far," he says with a grin. "There's a skip button too, if you can't face the pun-ishment."

'Gang Beasts' is brilliant. You should definitely play it, ideally with beers and friends.

At Games by the Sea, a local community-arranged evening taking place after Develop's Wednesday schedule's finished, hosted at a pub just down the seafront (and regularly held when the conference isn't in town, too), Boneloaf's James Brown is showing off Gang Beasts, a game that's been doing the rounds at many recent events. If you've seen it once, it's never forgotten—it's the one with the cute characters trying to knock each other off a variety of silly environments, pushing each other into huge grinders or splatting opponents into road signs while riding on the back of trucks. It's impossible to watch without getting sucked in, and it's silly in all of the right ways.

But as the game edges closer to launch, Brown is looking at how he can make it an event piece so Boneloaf has an excuse to keep bringing it to places like these. "We made a stress test with 15 game controllers," he tells me. "When we finish the full game we want to make a special build with support for significantly more players than the standard one-to-eight-player Steam build, to use at large-screen events like Games <3 Cinema in Berlin and Fantastic Arcade in Austin."

See this guy? This guy gets it.

Inside the Hilton, Dan Pinchbeck of The Chinese Room is convincingly talking up the local indie studio's (it's based literally up the road in Preston Park) imminent PS4 exclusive, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. He uses the word "community"—that's what his new game is about, in a way. The player needs to uncover what happened to the rural community that has, like most people in the whole world, vanished. He's not into laying down a prescribed story, admitting that "we're not very good at doing stories, as an industry, and most of our characters are just cyphers for mechanics," preferring instead to let the player find their own path through the game. "The most powerful tool is the player's imagination. We're releasing the story from the shackles of being a mechanical tool."

On stage beside Dan is Ninja Theory's Tameem Antoniades, currently working on mental health-themed Vikings-versus-Celts adventure Hellblade. "Mental health is still a taboo subject in games," he says. "So you have to do your research. I never realized how vivid hallucinations can be for those who experience them, and they're something that can't be switched off." He explains how Hellblade's protagonist, Senua, will be tormented by terrifying visions – and these will be truthful, based on her experiences. "You have to feel that she's real," he adds. "You have to bond with her." Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Hellblade are indie productions, but both have big-budget looks. They could both soon be saying something genuinely new in the mainstream gaming market, and that kind of progress, nurtured by events like Develop, is to be celebrated.

Later, Dan Da Rocha, the creator of Q.U.B.E. and forthcoming puzzle-platformer Hue, talks about his last five years as an indie dev. He was initially inspired to get into games-making through attending Develop, and while a lot of the advice he offers might qualify as simple common sense to many in the room, his words about the return of "double-A" games, the likes of No Man's Sky and The Witness, really resonate. Games like these, games like ...Rapture and Hellblade, are so far from what some gamers consider indie titles to be. They're not pixel art and primitive mechanics, but rich and enveloping worlds ripe for exploration. "Indie" has become as good as meaningless as an adjective preceding "game." It stands for attitudes, for ethics and ideologies, but it's no longer a pigeonhole for a genre. Many at Develop would say that it never was, but it's time for the mainstream to wake up to that fact, too.

Virtual reality was out in force at Develop—here's futuristic racer 'Radial-G' being shown to an attendee.

VICE's coverage not enough for you? Read what Motherboard has to say about indie games.

I could tell you several more stories to have been spawned by just a few days on the south coast, amongst this community of creators. Like how I spent my final evening of Develop in an ice cream shop in the center of Brighton while a games composer unwittingly smeared chocolate all over his white T-shirt. The employee behind the till was the first to notice, exclaiming in a loud Italian accent: "Look! Just like a baby!" #Likeababy isn't trending yet, but it's going to remain the most memorable ice cream I've had for a while.

Develop reinforces the feeling that the games industry cares, that it's driven by people, not profits, and that even though it can be rough for developers just starting out, there's a wonderful support network for them to call upon. Ed Vaizey's right to celebrate the money that the British games industry adds to the nation's economy, but on an individual level it can be a low-paid practice, unless you happen to be someone like PewDiePie. (He lives in Brighton, but he's not spotted once—a shame in a way, given one talk's clarion-like confirmation that YouTube is the place where younger gamers get the most information on new releases.) So if you work with games, you have to love them, as there's a strong possibility that they're not going to make you your fortune.

Important games people having important lunch

Away from the bullshit that gets said about video games on the internet, or more specifically the pointless wars over technical specs or developer-outlined objectives actually turning out to be impossible to achieve (you know the chatroom, message board and social network arguments I'm on about), there's a palpable sense of community to independent games making. Develop shines a positive light on that, on this group of people who actually do really want to make the best new Call of Duty that they can, or the next indie megahit, or even put forward ideas to help Randy realize a Duke Nukem that isn't a stagnant shitshow of cruel misogyny and dated design.

Roll your sleeves up all you like, Randy, but you didn't quite get away with that particular magic trick.

Follow Jake Tucker and Mike Diver on Twitter.

This week Stephen Hawking announced that he was partnering with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner on a ten-year, $100 million project called "Breakthrough Listen," the largest effort to date to find proof of aliens. That led me to wonder how all the other attempts were faring.

Most of the world's scientific activity in the field comes under the collective name SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Dr. Ragbir Bhathal leads Australia's initiative, the Optical SETI project. As an astronomer and professor at the University of Western Sydney, he regularly scans the skies from the college's observatory. He thinks if there is extraterrestrial life out there, we may be just a generation or two away from finding it.

VICE: Hi Dr. Bhathal, can you explain why we're so fascinated with finding extraterrestrial life?
Ragbir Bhathal: It's been a fascination since antiquity. It would seem an absolute waste of space if there is no other intelligent life in the universe, so it's a curiosity about how could we be the only ones here. Of course this causes problems for people who are religious, because in some religions a god made mankind, so you wouldn't be wasting your time making other beings in the universe. But I'm not a religious man, I'm a physicist.

What personally compels you to do this?
It's one of the great questions in humankind. I think if we find ET it would change our view of the world we live in. Like when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It didn't change the price of cheese as such, but it changed the whole way we think about the universe. It was a real conceptual shift.

You've been at this a long time. Is there actually any evidence yet?
There's no evidence at the moment. But if you asked this question say 50 years ago, they hadn't found any extrasolar planets. Now the Kepler mission has found over a thousand possible extrasolar planets. So the chances are becoming much better; people are realizing, "Hey look, there are extrasolar planets in the universe, surely one or two of them might have life." It's a logical statement, that's all. And in science, that has to be proved with evidence.

Stephen Hawking just launched the Breakthrough Listen project, funded by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. Do you think initiatives like this will help us get there?
Yes, definitely. If government money is put into projects like this there can be complaints that it's a pie in the sky-type thing. But here's a person in the private sector putting up money himself. That's great, I think we should have more people like this guy.

How long do you think it will take to find that evidence?
Possibly a couple of generations. Technology is changing so fast, it used to change within a generation or so but today it's much faster, say in 12 or 18 years. Even so, all these technologies that we're building now on the earth might be obsolete. We don't know how far they've gone, if it's 5,000 years, 10,000 years they must be very much ahead of us. If so, the technology we're using may be old hat.

Into aliens? Check out our video on the 'Valley of the UFOs'

What could making contact with extraterrestrial life mean for humankind?Advanced civilizations teach other civilizations how to do things. But the drawback is that they take over. They can teach us something if they're benevolent, but if they're not they can do things we won't welcome. That's what we have to be very careful of. But I suppose if you find an intelligent civilization it will be so many light years away that the possibility of them landing on earth may be very slim. We don't know, but it's an assumption we make.

So how do you search for extraterrestrial life, anyway?
There are two ways of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence or ET. We use radio wave technology and radio telescopes, which was the major way of searching up to about 2000. But from when that started in 1960, they hadn't found anything in 40 years. So it was time for another search strategy. That's laser technology: There's the optical search strategy, which is looking for very fast "nanosecond pulses" of laser flashes coming to earth.

Both strategies are good. Arthur C. Clarke, the late science fiction author and SETI patron, said to me he thought laser technology would win in the end. That's my view. If ET is so intelligent, they would have passed the stage of radio technology.

Say we do find extraterrestrial life. What form will it take?
Extraterrestrial life is possibly like you and me, but not the same form as us. What I am sure of is if there is ET they must be highly intelligent; they must be communications engineers, mathematicians, citizens. That's sort of a scientific definition. I don't know what ET looks like, but Hollywood seems to know the answer.

Why is this work important?
Basically to satisfy a curiosity in the human mind. Human beings are curious, and I think if you're not curious about the universe you live in, you might as well become a cabbage. That's how I'd put it.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

All photos by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Newquay is a seaside town of two stories. In the sleepy sunlight hours it's a place defined by its craggy cliffs and Cornish pasties; the colorful surf shops flogging a Santa Cruz lifestyle and Camden Market burlap change purses. But by night the place staggers into action, and of course it's this Newquay—a Newquay of puke, herbal ecstasy, and endless fingerings—which makes the papers. In the imaginations of those who've been reading headlines about the town in the national press for the past 15 years, it's likely something akin to a budget Magaluf with added goose-pimples; wasted feral children roaming in packs, thrusting their "European driving licenses" at bouncers, making Vines of each other eating glass and drinking alcohol through their eyes.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, a new tradition dictated that kids who'd just finished their GCSEs would flock to Newquay en masse to celebrate by the Celtic sea. Bringing a supply of booze from home, fake IDs were rarely questioned by some restaurants, off-licenses, and venues when stocks needed topping up, and so the town became a playground for under-18s: a place where they could get shit-faced unsupervised for a week.

A Drink Aware report from 2010 estimated that after the climax of the GCSEs, some 5,000 16 and 17-year-olds descended upon Newquay each year. Considering its population is under 20,000, that's a huge number of binge drinkers to land on one small town in the space of a month. As well as this, Newquay is the stag night capital of the UK and at the height of the holiday season, the town's population reportedly swells to a staggering 120,000 people.

Media coverage of this rite of passage peaked in 2009, during what was branded the "fortnight of shame" after the tragic deaths of two teenagers in separate cliff falls. During that time, locals banded together to form the Newquay Safe Partnership, an umbrella organization for a number of groups determined to reduce crime and make it a family-friendly resort by promoting the introduction of ID scanners at clubs and encouraging businesses to take more responsibility in reducing street drinking.

This season yet more measures were taken to crack down on debauchery: the mankini is now banned (actually), and those brandishing sex toys in public or wearing clothing bearing offensive images will be barred from pubs. According to police and community leaders, figures are already showing a drop in crime and antisocial behavior.

However, rules and regulations don't necessarily always win out over people's desire to get messy, as the widely ignored new anti-street drinking legislation in Magaluf has shown. So VICE photographer Jake Lewis and I traveled down to Cornwall's most popular holiday resort at the beginning of July for a three-day weekend to see what was up.

Browsing online after I took my seat on the morning train from Paddington, it quickly became apparent that while officials might see Newquay as completely regenerated—"The town has cleaned its act up," said Mayor Dave Sleeman a couple of weeks before we arrived—those who benefit from the pisshead tourist trade aren't giving it up that easily.

The hostel we stayed at, The Escape, marketed itself to stags and hens as a venue for the "ultimate Newquay weekender," complete with a bar that stays open until 4 AM. The website also touts the hotel as "the perfect venue for after the GCSEs blow out trips."

A Google search shows plenty of other hostels advertising to the two demographics in a similar way, and after sharing the train carriage with a stag party and being asked by a drunk guy if we were school leavers going down for the week, I had to presume the general public wasn't quite as "on-message" as the locals would like them to be.

Watch Swansea Love Story, our film about a group of young addicts caught up in Swansea's heroin epidemic:

Arriving in Newquay, you could see why people flock to the town; all roads lead to the sea, there's a Bargain Booze, and the dozens of venues are all within a short walk of each other. Most of these bars and clubs are placed in and around what I'll call "The Quad," the town's liver assault capital. And at the top of the slope, looking down over the sandy beach, is the rat's nest: a large Walkabout.

We learned from local hostel and bar staff that the summer timetable was a straightforward one. During the week, the kids come. They find their fun in the nightclubs' under-18s "nappy nights," stay in hostels and hotels at the cheaper weekday rate and get smashed on the booze they've brought down with them (a survey found that 53 percent of British parents who planned to supply their 16 and 17-year-olds with alcohol for a week-long holiday would give them five or more bottles of spirits or wine). The vast majority of these kids then go home on the Friday, when the stags and hens arrive, charging around in pink learner plates and personalized hoodies.

Did teens still consider the post-GCSE Newquay trip a thing? One short guy in a pack of 15 or so down from Bristol for the week told me: yes. "It's quite a tradition in Bristol that loads of us come down and get drunk," he said. "Most of us have older brothers, and they did it before us." It's still widespread enough a ritual, he added, that they'd seen other people they knew from home there that week. They weren't relying on the local businesses to secure booze—because no one does, apparently—and instead had brought it down themselves.

Besides the majority male skew, there didn't seem to be a specific "type" still engaging in this tradition; there was a real mix of private and state school kids, guys with Jack Wilshere haircuts, big-chested rugby lads, satellite town stoners in joggers and New Eras, awkward Inbetweeners-types and future merchant bankers.

"Why do you want to come here?" I asked the little lad from Bristol. He summed up what I imagine had brought all those disparate groups here: "It's basically our first taste of independence."

While the presence of teenage tourists was undeniable, it was clearly nothing like the old days, if the headlines are to be believed. Where were the kids at night, now unable to buy cider from the offie or shots from the Indian restaurant? A quick scout around found them outside Subway, Meatball Marinara in one hand, refilled bottle of Coke in the other; or mooching down by the beach, drinking cans of beer and sharing a spliff. Nothing that was going on seemed terribly wild, to be honest.

Gerry, our hostel owner, who's been in the business for years, told us about the recent decline in teen binge culture. "Every place in the UK sent their kids down here before 2009," he said, referring to the "fortnight of shame" that same year. "It was way crazy; a cult thing. Now, there are just a few places—the same schools sending them back year after year."

Gerry is trying to open that market back up, while ensuring the experience is one a 16-year-old would be all right with their mom seeing on Facebook. "We don't have TVs—just music, organized barbecues, and surfing," he said, gesturing to photos on the wall of guests eating burgers on the beach. "We're trying to rekindle it, but it's not the same."

He's also decided to vet potential teenage guests by offering surfing lessons as part of the deal, to put off those who just want to get hammered and cause trouble.

So, if Newquay isn't a bucket list destination for teenage binge-drinking any more, what is it?

Two nights around The Quad were enough to illustrate that men wearing tutus and oversized banana costumes still dominate proceedings once the sun goes down.

The stag experience in Newquay is exactly what you'd expect it to be: herds of topLADs with weirdly small heads on oversized bodies riding their banterlopes around dance floors and smoking areas, pretending to jerk off their friends, throwing up in their own mouths, and getting their dicks out.

Bar staff told us that stags, like the teens, aren't as numerous as they once were—nor are they as badly behaved. Despite this, the bouncer at the door at Whiskers, a wine bar, told us the town would soon be introducing a breathalyzer scheme. He's worked in Newquay for years and considers the measure to be bullshit, arguing that it will cause more aggro than necessary.

Watching a woman whack her friend with inflatable genitalia, I wondered how bad all this actually was. Really, the behavior was nothing worse than I'd seen in areas with big student populations, like Newcastle, or even Canterbury. In fact, it was marginally more restrained, because the drunk people were fully-grown humans, not 19-year-olds with a £3,000 [$4,700] maintenance loan and zero responsibilities for the next three years.

Wrapped up in it, part of me couldn't help but feel this is the perfect place to let loose: by the sea, fresh air, away from anything that feels remotely metropolitan. Looking at London, where we're seeing a worrying increase in the policing of nightlife—where licenses are being revoked and famed venues shut down—it was easy to understand those enjoying what Newquay had to offer.

With the benefit of a hangover, however, the negatives were clear: you don't normally move somewhere to get closer to men dressed as brides starting loud, angry fights with each other.

READ ON MUNCHIES: Medieval Cuisine Is Saving Cornwall, the UK's Biggest Party Town

We spoke to one woman eating in a Belushi's who was very vocal about the detrimental effect of stags and hens on her hometown. "I've lived here forever—I was here when it was still like living in a bubble," she said. "Then the 2 AM licenses came in. Then the 5AM license, and we were branded as a shit Ibiza. Then there's getting the two-page spread in the Sun every time a stag group does something really stupid."

She, like many others, wants them gone.

It's just that not absolutely everyone agrees. Some locals enjoy the nightlife that would inevitably crumble if it could no longer rely on customers from the rest of the UK.

One woman from Nottingham who'd moved down to Cornwall compared it to her hometown favorably. "There's no violence here whenever we come out. In Nottingham, they need the bouncers and the rules because there's fights and bottlings. We don't need breathalyzers or any of that," she said. "It's safe fun here compared to other places, and we enjoy it."

There's also a sense that some in the hospitality industry don't care too much about stags and hens as long as they're fueling work. Martyn Pegg, 43, a chef, told me that putting up with the near-constant presence of piss-drunk stags in his town centre is a sacrifice he's willing to make. "They pay our wages," he said. "If that goes, we'd be out of work, and we'd never keep Newquay as nice as it is. It's a catch-22."

And Newquay is beautiful. All that money from the tourist trade is keeping it nicely tended to. On the Sunday morning that we walked into town it was like the place had been flipped on its axis.

During the day, Newquay offers everything a holiday-maker could want: local produce, glitter tattoos that apparently mean "slut," cliffs to walk across while surfers ride waves, and inflatable playgrounds for families with kids to muck around on. The sun was shining, tourists were taking cream teas, old ladies chatted with local shopkeepers, holiday-makers were buying the usual tat. It was bizarre to think this was the same place I'd seen a man piss directly into his own friend's mouth the night before.

Before leaving, we met with a representative of Verto, a company providing the first fully sustainable homes in the UK. Looking out over the town from their building site—at the carnival marching its way through the town—you realize just how small Newquay is, and understand the desperation from some to ensure it remains pleasant. From here, you could see all the other new developments rising up around the town. These new-builds, said the Verto man, were what was going to help Newquay's economy greatly—not the stags.

Perhaps they will. But I know one common narrative of seaside towns—I'd seen it back home in the Isle of Wight; development doesn't necessarily mean a boost to a local rural economy. They were beautiful, brilliant houses on a breathtaking stretch of coast—but who was going to own them? How much were those people really going to contribute to the area's economy? Would they be permanent residences, or second-homes for the rich, the types who might pop down for the odd weekend and a couple of weeks in the summer?

This burgeoning housing development was another piece of Newquay's strangely fragmented identity. Another group of people wanting to make Newquay into their own ideal.

"Welcome to Newquay: coast of dreams," said the sign on our arrival. Whose dreams were they, exactly? Newquay no longer seems to be a teen town, and while nightlife might still be dominated by stags in the summer months, strong voices and authorities in the community are trying to stamp them out too. Locals were divided on what they want their town to be, while property developers have started to build beautiful houses for middle-class and second-home owners. It's a splintered place—not quite one thing, but not quite another, either. A stag and hen town. A new development town. A holiday-maker's retreat. Right now, Newquay is still all of these different things to different people, just hanging in the balance. But it doesn't feel like it will be able to support them all for long.

We came half-expecting teens on Spice and stags bottling each other in the streets. Instead, we found a British seaside town going through an identity crisis.

Follow Hannah and Jake on Twitter.

Still via trailer

As the documentary I Am Thor screened at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal a thunderstorm raged outside. Jon Mikl Thor, armed with an oversized hammer and adorned with a mask and white cape, stood before an audience gripped with anticipation. Over 40 years into his rock and roll career, and 15 years into his "comeback," the former He-Man lookalike showed no indication that age was catching up with him. Maybe the crashing of lightning outside the theatre was a blessing from the Thunder God, or maybe things in Thor's life are finally going to change, because inside the room—which normally serves as a university lecture hall—the crowd went wild as he, along with his long-time guitarist Steve Price, put on an improbably energetic show.

Jon Mikl Thor always wanted to be Superman. Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s and '60s, he wore his Superman costume to class. When VICE caught up with him at Fantasia he reflected on this time in his life, "I'd ask kids to throw bricks at my head" he said. "Not realizing they wouldn't just bounce off me."Following in the footsteps of his brother, he started doing competitive bodybuilding—by the time he turned 19, he had won over 40 titles around the world.

That wasn't enough, though, and he retired from bodybuilding to venture into music. Thor's music career has always been built around his body, his strength, and his voice. Thor was once poised to be the next big star of rock and roll: he was the full package; he had the looks, the talent, and the charisma. Mismanagement, a bizarre kidnapping, and a series of health issues , all of which are covered in the film, have interfered with his success. But, that never stopped Thor, and he refuses to give up on his dreams.

Thor's path to rock stardom got off to a promising start with an appearance on the Merv Griffin Show in 1976. More than music, Thor put on a performance that showcased his strength and physique. He would bend steel rods and blow air into a hot water bottle until it exploded. Thor no longer does these feats of strength, saying, "I'm happy all that stuff is captured on film, but it's too dangerous for me to do now. I think I can still bend a steel rod, but it takes away from the music." Reviewers of his shows would focus on the performance, often ignoring the songs. The band has never had a hit—one of the biggest obstacles to their success—but they have some legitimately good music. Their best known album, Unchained, is theatrical, sure, but it's catchy and fun—no irony required. Songs like "Anger" and "Lightning Strikes Again" feel like metal anthems that have yet to be discovered.

Reflecting on his career now, Thor can't help thinking he was ahead of his time: "People now are more interested in health and positivity, that wasn't the case when we started," he said. "We never wanted to be anything we weren't. Other bands were changing who they were to fit trends, we never did that."

Now about 60, he loves to talk about his life, his music, and his future. He seemed confident that success is just around the corner, almost blissfully ignorant that he was already living his dream. His desire for recognition overshadowing the fact he has accomplished so much. He spoke with humility, and his desire for fame somehow never came across as egotistical. In his presence, it was impossible not to feel the love he has for what he does and his dedication to the fans by structuring shows around their requests. As seen in the documentary, it doesn't matter if he has a crowd of six or six thousand, he never fails to put on the performance of a lifetime.

While the documentary has the potential to introduce new audiences to his music, it may be Thor's career in movies that is perhaps the best gateway into his work. When music failed, Thor turned to film, working on a few cult classics. Comparing himself to Elvis Presley, he explained how he believes that a musical career and a film career are interconnected—he just wished he had his chance at a mainstream role. While he made impressions in films like Recruits (1986) and Zombie Nightmare (1987), his greatest cinematic contribution was Rock n' Roll Nightmare (1987), which he produced, wrote, and starred in. Around the time he made the latter film, he was on the brink of retirement, and his presence has an air of the surreal. He is by far the best actor in the film, his presence is natural and charismatic but above all else the film is infused with a wonderful spontaneity and heroism. In the tradition of Thor's DIY career, the film's low budget quality adds rather than detracts from the experience. It's like entering the mind of an incredible creative child, nearly impossible not to be taken by its imaginativeness and youthful spirit.

The film's status as a monster movie resonates deeply. During our interview, we'd be ready to move onto a new topic and he'd turn the conversation around: "Let's go back to that monster question." We spoke about the silent cinema of Lon Chaney, David Lynch's Eraserhead and Frankenstein. He was as excited to talk about these films as he was his own accomplishments—a quirk that made them seem very much like a fabric of his identity. Crucially, none of these monsters are bad guys, they are all misunderstood outcasts. After all, for all his strength and heroism, even Superman was a monster and an outcast. Even at the height of his career, when Jon seemed to have everything, the monstrous was always what was creeping behind him, pushing the full weight of his ambition forward but also maybe holding him back. The documentary latches onto this idea and showcases the quintessential Thor performance—one that is constantly drifting between tragedy and comedy.

For all his struggles, quirks, and obstacles, it is clear Jon is a star. Maybe not a star in North America, but to watch scenes in the doc of his adoring fans during his Northern European tour, it's clear his lifework has had a great impact on many lives. His presence, his positivity, and his love for what he does is all larger than life. It's a tired cliche to describe someone as a "nice guy," but Jon Mikl Thor is THE nice guy. A nice guy who dresses up like the God of Thunder. But as Thor himself once sang: "I sometimes act like a fool / But that has kept me alive."

Check out Jesse Balmer's website and Twitter.